LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Martin Daniel Niemetz
Promoting a Deliberative System for
Global Peace and Security:
How to Reform the United Nations’
Decision-Making Procedures
A thesis submitted to the Department of International Relations of the
London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of
Declaration
I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it).
The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent.
I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party.
I declare that my thesis consists of 82765 words.
Abstract
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION p. 5
PART ONE: FRAMEWORK p. 16
I. Promoting a Deliberative System: The Desirability Score p. 17 II. The Politics of UN Reform: The Feasibility Score p. 64
III. Overview of Reform Proposals p. 98
PART TWO: EVALUATION p. 105
IV. SC Membership and Voting p. 106
V. SC Working Methods p. 145
VI. Relations between SC and GA p. 211
VII. Relations between SC and Civil Society p. 245
VIII. Overview of Evaluation Results p. 284
CONCLUSION p. 291
Introduction
The necessity of a reform of the United Nations (UN) can be approached from two different but compatible angles: Firstly, political institutions in general need to adapt to changing environments in order to continue functioning appropriately over the course of time. The fact that the most enduring constitutions contain procedures for their amendment testifies both to the wisdom of preparing for unforeseeable future developments as well as to the necessity of institutional adaptation. It could be argued that the founding of the UN was in itself such a process of institutional adaption: at the end of the Second World War, the founders of the UN used the institutional framework of the League of Nations as the primary point of reference in negative as well as in positive terms and modified it in a way that reflected their perception of the necessities imposed by their contemporary environment. Almost seven decades have passed since then, and today’s environment poses a very different challenge to the UN’s decision-making bodies.
The institutional procedures for the UN’s decision-making on issues of global peace and security, first and foremost the Security Council (SC), were conceived with the objective of enabling a swift but internationally coordinated response to irregular situations of crises. Today, however, the UN is constantly involved in situations of conflict and has expanded its range of activities well beyond the role of an international fire brigade. This is but one example of the remarkable change in demands the UN’s decision-making bodies have been facing over the past decades.1 Opinions vary on how well the organization has managed to adapt to these changing
1For an overview of the changing context of global peace and security, see, e.g., United Nations
circumstances, but virtually everyone would agree that the need for adaptation remains a constant challenge. Should the UN’s decision-making procedures fail to adapt to the requirements posed by their changing environment, the organization could lose its effectiveness and risk becoming irrelevant to global politics. From this perspective, UN reform is a matter of ensuring the effectiveness and relevance of its decision-making procedures.
Secondly, international organizations play a crucial role in the democratization of global politics. Both the creation of the League of Nations as well as that of the UN were inspired by principles of democratic decision-making, and voting procedures became the key mechanism for collective decision-making in these organizations. Although the establishment of these organizations constituted a considerable advance in the institutionalization of democracy in intergovernmental relations, the application of principles of democracy in their design was severely limited by the political and social fragmentation of their respective memberships. The exclusive veto right of the five permanent members of the SC is the most prominent manifestation of this limitation. Opinions vary on whether the political and social environment today is any more permissive to the democratization of institutions of decision-making than in the past, but most commentators would agree that such democratization is desirable in principle. From this perspective, UN reform is a matter of pushing the limits of democratic decision-making in global politics.
subject, Edward Luck has applied his in-depth knowledge of the UN, acquired through years of practical engagement, in order to lay bare these interests and to analyze the political dynamics in the UN membership. By infusing the academic debate with a sobering sense of the realities at the UN and by pointing out the political limits any attempt at reform has to take into account, his work has become fundamental to any systematic treatise on the subject, but it does not provide any concrete and positive direction to UN reform.
As Luck writes with regard to the SC in general, “few institutions have generated so much commentary yet so little systematic analysis.”2This situation is amplified if the subject of inquiry is narrowed down to the question of institutional reform. Dimitrios Bourantonis’ work is a remarkable exemption: with The History and Politics of UN Security Council Reform he provides a detailed and extraordinarily well researched historic analysis of the subject.3 He does not, however, point out the direction for present attempts at reform. With his extensive knowledge and succinct analysis of the wider UN system, Thomas Weiss has shaped much of the academic debate on UN reform. But while, e.g., his monographWhat is Wrong with the UN and How to Fix it
clearly identifies the underlying trends and root problems regarding institutional change and categorically elaborates a conceptual fundament for successful attempts at reform, it does not provide the type of concrete and directly applicable guidance the title alludes to.4
2Edward Luck,UN Security Council: Practice and Promise, London; New York: Routledge 2006, p.
xv.
3Dimitris Bourantonis,The History and Politics of UN Security Council Reform, London; New York:
Routledge 2005.
4Thomas Weiss,What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix it, Cambridge; Malden, MA:
Essentially, the reason for this lack of practical-minded and specific guidance on how to reform the UN’s decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security is that the relevant literature does not take an explicitly normative approach to the subject and does not, therefore, engage in a thorough elaboration of a theoretical standpoint from which to evaluate the desirability of specific proposals for reform. The fact that, as Kimberly Hutchings points out, “international relations theory is not only about politics, it also is itself political”5is not openly addressed. Conversely, this thesis will provide an approach to the evaluation of reform proposals that bridges theory and practice and connects the minutia of institutional design with the abstract principals of democratic theory in a systematic and reproducible method, thereby enabling a clear normative evaluation of even the smallest technical detail of reform. It will offer a concrete and practically applicable answer to the question of how to increase the legitimacy of the UN’s decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security.
In bridging the gap between theory and practice, this thesis also contributes to the ‘practical turn’ in the academic debate on deliberative democracy. One of the most salient criticisms of deliberative democracy has been that it gave no practical guidance on how to design political institutions.6 This criticism brought about what Dryzek terms the ‘practical turn’ in deliberative democracy “where the emphasis is on the strengthening or introduction of deliberative democracy in the real world of
politics.”7 While today much work has been done with regard to the application of
5Kimberly Hutchings,International Political Theory: Rethinking Ethics in A Global Era, London
1999, p. 69.
6Anthony McGrew, “Transnational Democracy”, in: April Carter and Geoffrey Stokes (eds.), Democratic Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity 2002, p. 279.
7Dryzek, John,Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance, Oxford; New York: Oxford
principles of deliberative democracy in the institutional design of national parliaments and mini-publics such as citizens’ juries, and although Dryzek et al. outlined the design of a ‘Global Deliberative Citizens’ Assembly’,8 previous attempts to address the question of how to reform already existing international organizations have not led to any concrete and readily implementable recommendations.9
This thesis will review and evaluate all those proposals for UN reform which concern exclusively its decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security. Such limitation of scope is necessary in order to guarantee a focused and coherent analysis. As a result, all proposals aiming at a reform of the composition and procedures of the Security Council will be included and, naturally, since it bears the “primary responsibility for international peace and security,”10 much of the analysis will focus on this institution. Proposals to reform other institutions of the UN will only be considered if they are directed either at the relationship of these bodies with the SC or at internal procedures and responsibilities exclusive to decision-making on issues of global peace and security.
This generous limitation of scope will entail the evaluation of a multitude of proposals for reform. The thesis will, therefore, produce an unprecedented comprehensive and categorical overview of all such proposals put forward at the UN and in the academic debate. Reflecting the thesis’ focus on an improvement of the normative legitimacy of the UN as such, rather than on the interests of its Member States, this overview will
8Dryzek, John, André Bächtiger and Karolina Milewicz, “Toward a Global Deliberative Citizens’
Assembly”,Global Policy, 2 (1), 2011, pp. 33-42.
9See, e.g., Patrizia Nanz and Jens Steffek, “Global Governance, Participation and the Public Sphere”, Government and Opposition, 39 (2), 2004, pp. 314-335; Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, “Global Democracy?”,NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, 37 (4), 2005, pp. 763-798.
10Charter of the United Nations, Chapter V, Article 24:
be structured in terms of the institutional target of the reform proposal, rather than according to their source, and will serve as the schematic skeleton of the evaluation. As such, it also provides the reader with easy selective access to information on specific institutional issue areas within the wider reform debate.
Since this comprehensive outlook on reform entails a wide array of proposals, it is necessary to fashion methodological tools that enable a systematic and comparative evaluation of the many individual proposals. The thesis will elaborate criteria for the evaluation of both the normative desirability as well as the political feasibility of the proposals and quantify their level of fulfillment of these criteria, producing two comprehensive indicators: the ‘Desirability Score’ and the ‘Feasibility Score’. Although these indicators are developed against the specific background of the UN’s decision-making procedures on issues of international peace and security, they are transferable and may be applied in, or inspire the evaluation of efforts at reform of decision-making procedures in other institutional contexts.
input in the decision-making itself.11 By approaching the UN’s decision-making procedures in terms of a deliberative system, this thesis will emphasize the interconnections between individual institutions and explore the opportunities and challenges inherent in inter-institutional input. This systemic outlook will bring into focus the relations between the SC and the General Assembly (GA) as well as those between the SC and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).
The latter relationship, particularly, has been largely disregarded in the academic literature, leaving a lacuna in the study of the UN’s decision-making. The only exception to this is James Paul who provides a historic overview of the relationship between the SC and NGOs. However, while Paul offers an enlightening introduction to the subject and convincingly explains why and how this relationship has become more important since the end of the Cold War, he does not offer a systematic analysis of the institutional procedures involved.12 Others, such as Jonathan Graubart, have analyzed this relationship in terms of policy implementation, but not in terms of decision-making.13
The comprehensive and systemic approach will not only entail a broadening but also a deepening of the outlook on the reform of the UN’s decision-making procedures. So far, the academic literature has largely focused on the debate regarding an expansion of the membership of the SC and the modification of its voting procedures. But, as
11Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane, “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions”,Ethics & International Affairs,20 (4), 2006, p. 432.
12James Paul, “Working with Nongovernmental Organizations”, in: David Malone (ed.),The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21stCentury, Boulder, CO; London: Lynne Rienner 2004,
pp. 373-390.
13Jonathan Graubart, “NGOs and the Security Council: Authority all Around but for Whose Benefit?”,
Thomas Weiss and Karen Young point out, the area in which reform is the most likely is in its working methods: “The potential to foster them and to invent new ones is a more promising way to improve Security Council accountability and effectiveness
than overly optimistic notions about amending the Charter.”14
There are two exceptions to the dearth of systematic analyses of the Council’s working methods: Sydney Bailey and Sam Daws’ monograph, The Procedure of the UN Security Council,15and Susan Hulton’s chapter on Council Working Methods and Procedures in David Malone’s The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century.16 Both of these contributions to the literature are, however, somewhat
outdated. Not only has the political context of the debate on working methods changed, but it is also the one area of reform in which there is a palpable dynamic of institutional progress. Ian Hurd17 and Jochen Prantl18 have elaborated on particular phenomena of this progress, but a comprehensive and up-to-date analytical overview of the dynamics in the Council’s working methods is lacking. By shedding light on this progress, this thesis counters the impression that the UN is incapable of adjusting its decision-making procedures, and it thereby also attempts to defuse the correlated danger of a reform fatigue among both practitioners and academics that could hamper further progress altogether.
14Thomas Weiss and Karen Young, “Compromise and Credibility: Security Council Reform?”, Security Dialogue, 36 (2), 2005, p. 152.
15Sydney Bailey and Sam Daws,The Procedure of the UN Security Council, Oxford: Clarendon Press
1998.
16Susan Hulton, “Council Working Methods and Procedures”, in: David Malone (ed.),The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21stCentury, Boulder; London: Lynne Rienner 2004, p.
237-251.
17Ian Hurd, “Security Council Reform: Informal Membership and Practice”, in: Bruce Russett (ed.), The Once and Future Security Council, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1997, pp. 135-152.
This thesis addresses both audiences, academics as well as practitioners, and makes specific policy recommendations. In this regard, it attempts to provide useful insights and may prove to be helpful to the process of setting priorities in efforts for reform. The thesis is, in general, action-oriented and offers a particular take on the future of the UN’s decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security.
Since there is scarce academic literature on many of the issue areas touched upon, primary sources will play a salient role in this thesis. On the one hand, it will make extensive use of the meeting records and other reports in the UN’s archives, and on the other hand, it will integrate various perspectives and insights gathered in a number of interviews with practitioners as well as some of the personal experiences I made while working at the UN. While some of the interviews with NGO representatives will be attributed directly, all of the interviews with UN staff and representatives of the Member States are off the record. The interviews were conducted in person in the UN Secretariat as well as in various permanent representations and NGO offices in New York in the course of October and November of 2010 and in June of 2012.
the Feasibility Score. The second part of the thesis will apply these analytical tools to the full range of relevant reform proposals in order to determine their desirability and their feasibility. It will begin with those proposals that concern the membership and the voting procedures of the SC, continue with those targeting its working methods, then move on to those that aim at the Council’s relationship with the GA, and conclude with the evaluation of those that address the SC’s relationship with Civil Society.
The key findings of the thesis will be that there is, first of all, a range of feasible proposals for reform that could improve the SC’s accountability both to the GA and the general public, that could increase the opportunities for effective input from the UN membership and NGOs, and that would thereby promote the UN’s decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security as a more inclusive, coherent and decisive deliberative system. In addition, there are several significant improvements that are unlikely in the immediate future, but that might be possible in the mid-term. This process of promoting a deliberative system is not one of revolutionary change, but a sequence of incremental innovations.
Secondly, the analysis will demonstrate that the SC is not the static and torpid institution of the past as it is often portrayed,19 but a highly adaptable and vivid decision-making body, i.e., the ‘Polymorph Security Council’. Since the prospects for a formal reshaping of its membership and voting arrangements are very low, the Council has learned to use informal procedures in order to adapt to the changing demands of its institutional and socio-political environment.
19For a compilation of these opinions, see Ian Hurd, “Myths of Membership: The Politics of
Part One:
I. Promoting a Deliberative System: The Desirability Score
Introduction
How can one evaluate the potential of reform proposals to increase the legitimacy of the United Nations’ decision-making? In this chapter, I will lay out my Habermasian approach to conceptualizing the UN’s decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security as a deliberative system. The promotion of such a system is both normatively desirable and empirically feasible. The fundamental argument is that, rather than considering the Security Council in isolation, a comprehensive evaluation of the potential of reform proposals to increase the democratic legitimacy of the United Nations’ governance of issues of international peace and security must be based on its conceptualization in terms of a deliberative system. On the basis of this argument, I will elaborate a procedure to determine the ‘Desirability Score’ of individual reform proposals.
The chapter will begin with an discussion of the public sphere and democracy, continue with an explanation of how deliberative synergy can create deliberative systems that increase the democratic legitimacy of a decision-making process, proceed to an analysis of the UN as a deliberative system and, finally, determine how to evaluate the potential of proposals for institutional reform to promote the UN as a deliberative system of decision-making.
The Public Sphere and Democratic Legitimacy
ensures a repository of meaning and understanding that serves as the glue of society. The default modus of communication in the lifeworld is a consensus oriented coordination of collective action, i.e., communicative action. The latter is based on discourse, the rational give and take of reasons, which is, in general, the only alternative to coercion in bridging a breakdown of consensus between members of a society. As with the syntactics of a language, the practice of discourse requires the implicit and often unconscious acknowledgment of certain rules of discourse. Just as much as it is impossible to effectively communicate linguistically without the adherence to a syntax, it is impossible to successfully engage in discourse without the adherence to its pragmatic presuppositions.
Habermas identifies the following pragmatic presuppositions for discourse: Firstly, there are logical rules, such as the principles of non-contradiction and consistency that structure discourse. Secondly, there are procedural rules including the requirement for truthfulness and accountability, i.e., the readiness to justify one’s assertions by providing adequate reasons. Finally, there are the rules that guarantee the exclusion of coercion from the process of deliberation: everyone has to be allowed to freely participate in the discourse by asking questions, by introducing assertions as well as by expressing attitudes, desires and needs.20 The aim of reaching a completely uncoerced consensus is an idealization of empirical processes which are usually only approximations to this ideal.
I shall return to the full range of pragmatic presuppositions further below. At this point, the focus must be on the third set of presuppositions that immunize discourse
20Jürgen Habermas,Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge: Polity Press 1990,
against coercion. In this regard, the question of equal participation takes on special significance in the context of international organizations. As mentioned above, societal consensus must be rooted in communicative action; the behavior of individuals has to be coordinated by the discursive creation and affirmation of norms. In the traditional case of decision-making within the political framework of the state, the objective of norm-setting is the coordination of the social interaction of the state’s citizens, which is why only said citizens need to be afforded the opportunity to participate in the discourses that shape the decision-making within the state. It is only they who have to be guarded against coercion: since outsiders will not be affected by the decisions being made, there is, logically, no danger that they might be coerced. Consequently, Habermas’ discourse principle states that “only those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational
discourse.”21
The case is, of course, not as straight forward with respect to the decision-making of international organizations. Most international organizations are limited legally in the reach of their governance: the International Criminal Court, e.g., has no jurisdiction over citizens of the United States and other non-state parties to the Rome Statute (that is, unless they commit crimes within the territory of a state party), and its decisions, therefore, can only legally affect a defined population. In the case of the UN’s decision-making procedures on global peace and security, the situation is different. Since the decisions of the Security Council are binding upon all the member states of the UN and since, at present, there is virtually no internationally acknowledged state outside of the UN framework, its decisions are imperative to all of humanity.
Consequently, when dealing with such an international organization whose decisions potentially affect all of humanity, the question must be how to determine whether all of humanity could agree to these decisions as participants in rational discourse?
In order to answer this question, it is necessary to first review Habermas’ conception of the public sphere and its role in modern societies. The public sphere is a communicatively constructed and reproduced social space in which societal problems are identified, analyzed and discussed. It is the space in which people communicate with each other on matters of public concern, be it directly or via media such as newspapers or the internet. As it grows out of the lifeworld, the public sphere is characterized by communicative action unrestrained by the imperatives of monetary and administrative systems. Although there is an implicit aim to reach common judgment, the public sphere is not the locus of definitive decision-making. Its main purpose, instead, is to remain constantly flexible and open to any input from the lifeworld which it filters through a process of public reasoning.
discourses that - via public institutions - produce the laws that govern society.
Before I can discuss the concept of the public sphere in the specific context of international organizations, it is necessary to elaborate Nancy Fraser’s concept of multiple publics. In Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Habermas conceptualized the public sphere in its bourgeois appearance.22 As such, this public sphere has two characteristics that are of importance here: Firstly, the bourgeois conception of the public sphere claims it to be the only public sphere existent in society, and secondly, it claims to be something fundamentally different from the state and categorically separate from it. Fraser, in contrast, argues that there always have been alternative public spheres alongside the bourgeois public sphere and that today we must think in terms of multiple and overlapping spheres: instead of there being a singular sphere, there exist dominant, subaltern, comprehensive and many more types of public spheres.23Moreover, Fraser problematizes the clear-cut separation between the public sphere and the state.
These two arguments are combined and best explained in the concept of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ public spheres. According to Fraser, a weak public sphere is one that enables the discursive formation of public opinion in an informal and virtually unrestricted fashion without encompassing any type of authoritative decision-making. The bourgeois public sphere is an example of such a weak public sphere. A strong public sphere, on the other hand, is characterized by the combination of formalized discursive opinion formation with the ability to translate these opinions into 22Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1990.
23Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
authoritative decisions. Sovereign parliaments are an example of strong public spheres as they engage both in public deliberation as well as in authoritative decision-making.24 In doing so, they also cut through the categorical distinction between the state and the public sphere. InFaktizität und Geltung, Habermas adopts both Fraser’s idea of multiple public spheres in general and her differentiation between strong and weak public spheres in particular.25
In theorizing the globalization of democracy without a state, Hauke Brunkhorst adapts the theme of strong and weak public spheres. Brunkhorst, however, takes a conceptual step away from the way Fraser and Habermas conceive of this distinction. He writes that “key elements of a strong public are not only - and here I depart from Fraser and Habermas - democratic parliaments and other spaces of highly formalised discourse
such as court procedures and decisions, but also a diverse network of public debates,
publications, advertising, television talk-shows, teach-ins, political demonstrations,
protest movements, associations, political parties, unions, cooperative public
administration and the like.”26As is evident from this section, the difference between Brunkhorst’s conception of weak and public spheres to that of Fraser and Habermas is actually more significant than he has spelled out. Brunkhorst conceives of a democratic parliament, in this context, as being an element of a strong public sphere, and the reader is left to believe Fraser and Habermas do the same, when really, in the latter’s view, a democratic parliament is a strong public sphere in itself. The key is that Brunkhorst conceives of the public sphere in the singular - what Fraser would call the comprehensive public sphere - whereas Fraser developed the idea of strong and
24Fraser,Rethinking the Public Sphere, pp. 133-135. 25Habermas,Faktizität und Geltung,pp. 373-374.
26Hauke Brunkhorst, “Globalizing Democracy Without the State: Weak Public, Strong Public, Global
weak public spheres in the context of multiple public spheres within society.
Brunkhorst upholds the categorical separation of public sphere and state: in this perspective the essential difference between a strong and a weak public sphere is that the former’s opinion formation is interlinked with those institutions that produce authoritative decisions, whereas that of the latter is not. More specifically, a strong public sphere “is legally bound to procedures of decision making through rights and organisational norms.”27 As noted above, in this perspective, a strong public sphere also requires a diverse network of public debates, publications, advertising, etc. Brunkhorst conceives of public spheres in this comprehensive manner because the object of his inquiry is the global public sphere. Having clarified this crucial distinction, I will adopt, for the present purposes, Brunkhorst’s conceptions of strong and weak public spheres. The global public sphere is comprehensive in the sense that it includes multitudes of spheres within itself and addresses virtually all of humanity as an audience as well as attempting to be open to input from all of humanity. I will return to Fraser’s distinction between strong and weak public spheres further below and recast it in the light of John Dryzek’s work.
I agree with Brunkhorst’s case for the existence of a rudimentary global public sphere. For both legal and social reasons, however, today’s global public sphere must definitely be categorized as weak. Even though Brunkhorst argues that there is ‘a strong global public in the making’, he also points out that the legal prerequisites for a strong public sphere are far from being fulfilled. The opinion formation within the global public sphere has virtually no direct legal linkages to the decision-making
procedures of institutions such as the UN Security Council.28 Regarding the social prerequisites – in Brunkhorst’s words ‘a diverse network of public debates, publications, advertising, television talk-shows, teach-ins, political demonstrations, protest movements, associations, political parties, unions, cooperative public administration and the like’ – although some of these elements exist on the global level and justify the argument for a weak public sphere, cumulatively, they do not live up to the requirements of strong public spheres as they exist in the domestic societies of constitutional states.
More importantly, the global public sphere is weak in the sense that access to it, although world-wide, is partial rather than universal. This fact is very tellingly visualized by a map created by Facebook of the global interconnections of its users:29 Whereas there are glowing connections between most of the world’s urban centers, two black spots catch the eye. One of them is China, where Facebook is confronted with political obstacles, and the other is Central Africa, where access to the internet is sparse. There are still immense political and technological/economic obstacles preventing the global public sphere from being truly inclusive in principal.
The weakness of the global public sphere brings with it the problem that the legitimacy which it could bestow on institutional decision-making procedures whose outcomes affect all of humanity is still very limited, especially when compared to the legitimacy that strong domestic public spheres - reproduced by a plethora of fora for inclusive public debate, rooted in constitutionally guaranteed rights, and with institutionalized linkages to authoritative decision-making - bestow upon the
respective states. Habermas points out furthermore that “[t]oday any conceptualization of a juridification of world politics must take as its starting point
individuals and states as the two categories of founding subjects of a world
constitution. The (as we would like to assume) legitimate constitutional states qualify
as founding members already in virtue of their current role in guaranteeing the
political self-determination of their citizens. In addition to the potential world
citizens, the states represent possible sources of legitimation because patriotic
citizens (in the best sense of ‘patriotic’) have an interest in preserving and improving
the respective national forms of life with which they identify and for which they feel
themselves responsible – in a self-critical way that also extends to their own national
history.”30
Habermas acknowledges at the same time that at present only a limited number of states qualify as ‘legitimate constitutional states’, which means that the legitimacy which international organizations can indirectly derive from strong domestic public spheres via the state is also inherently limited. Consequentially, when conceptualizing the legitimacy of international organizations whose decision-making potentially affects all of humanity, one is left with two partial but inadequate streams of legitimacy. On the one hand, such an organization can derive legitimacy from a weak global public sphere, on the other hand, it can derive legitimacy from a limited number of strong domestic public spheres via the respective states.
This means that in the present context of global politics, these organizations cannot rely exclusively on one or the other source of legitimacy, but that they instead must
30Jürgen Habermas, “The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legitimation Problems of
process the input of both in their decision-making. But how can the input from these two sources be combined and reconciled with each other? Since global referenda are infeasible in the near future,31 it is impossible to assign numeric values to the input received from the global public sphere, which means that it cannot be weighted quantitatively against the input received via the states. In fact, weighing the input of different states against each other is itself already a somewhat arbitrary exercise.
The best solution for a process of decision-making which in principle is equally open to the input both from states as well as from the weak global public sphere, without categorically favoring one over the other, is a deliberative screening. Rather than focusing entirely on the nature of the source, the input received needs to be evaluated on its own merits, and instead of assigning fixed percentages to various sources of input, deliberation enables a case-by-case screening of arguments and options in the procedure of decision-making. This means that an international organization’s capability to tap and combine both sources of legitimacy is dependent on the deliberative quality of its decision-making procedures.
This emphasis on deliberation does not equal a disregard of aggregative procedures and authoritative decision-making. Anthony McGrew criticizes that “there is significant silence about how intractable conflicts of interests or values can be
resolved deliberatively without recourse to some authoritatively imposed solution.
Therefore, deliberative democracy may be of marginal value in dealing with many of
the most pressing global distributional or security issues - from debt relief to
humanitarian intervention - which figure on the world political agenda.”32 It is, of course, essential for international organizations to arrive at legally binding decisions at the pace that is required by the rapid development of events in global politics.
This critique assumes, however, that theorists of deliberative democracy contend that political debates always have to be resolved by a wide consensus. But what Habermas and others really are saying is simply that political debate is, in principle, only possible under the assumption that consensus is an achievable option.33 If all the parties to a dispute knew from the start that consensus is impossible, they would resolve to act in a purely strategic fashion and the matter would be settled by the ‘tyranny of the majority’. The assumption that, under ideal circumstances of deliberation, consensus would be achievable is the only alternative to the forceful imposition of one party’s will upon the other and it does not exclude the recourse to a vote should the less than ideal circumstances of the real world (time-pressure, lack of resources, etc.) demand it. In general, deliberative democracy does not prevent the possibility of settling issues by political authority. It concerns itself instead with the questions of how much the decision-making process supports public deliberation and how much, in turn, the decisions of political authorities are supported by public deliberation. In this sense, the practical objective of reform should not be to ensure deliberative decision-making, but to create space for deliberation in decision-making.
Democratization via the Promotion of a Deliberative System
How can we evaluate the potential of proposals for reform to enhance the deliberative
32Anthony McGrew, “Transnational Democracy”, in: April Carter and Geoffrey Stokes (eds.), Democratic Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity 2002,p. 280.
33Rainer Schmalz-Bruns, “Deliberativer Supranationalismus: Demokratisches Regieren jenseits des
quality of the UN’s decision-making procedures and to thereby increase its democratic legitimacy? Until the late nineties, deliberative democracy was a purely theoretical issue dominated by philosophers. But with “the coming of age of deliberative democracy”34, as James Bohman puts it, theorists have increasingly developed interest in methods for its practical application. Robert Goodin points out that various efforts by linguists, comparative politics experts and international relations scholars to establish criteria for the evaluation of institutional deliberation have had remarkably similar results, and thus there exists among them a broad consensus on the key elements.35 He comes to this conclusion after comparing with each other the respective works of philosopher of language Paul Grice, of a group of scholars of international relations brought together by Knut Midgaard and of a team of political scientists around Jürg Steiner. Even though Grice and Midgaard et al. base their approach on John Austin, and Steiner et al. base theirs on Habermas’ pragmatic suppositions for discourse, the differences between the criteria they elaborate are only marginal and largely a matter of differing categorizations of similar content. Keeping in line with my Habermasian approach, I will base the evaluation of the potential of proposals for UN reform to increase the organizations democratic legitimacy on the criteria of the ‘discourse quality index’ elaborated by Jürg Steiner et al.:36
The first criterion of the index is that of open participation, meaning that, in principle, all individuals should have access to the deliberation. There is a significant difference between the manner in which Steiner et al. and Goodin apply the criterion of open participation. Whereas Steiner et al. are interested in determining the degree of
34James Bohman, “The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy”,Journal of Political Philosophy,
6 (4), 1998, pp. 400–425.
35Robert Goodin, “Sequencing Deliberative Moments“,Acta Politica, 40 (2), 2005, p. 183
36Jürg Steiner et al.,Deliberative Politics in Action: Analysing Parliamentary Discourse, Cambridge:
participation within a specific debate, Goodin applies it as an indicator of general access to a debate, i.e., with regard to the role of the public sphere.37For the former, it is mainly a matter of procedure, for the latter, it is more of a socio-political question. This unexpressed difference is exemplary for the often overlooked difference between issues of deliberative quality on the one hand and issues of deliberative democracy on the other.
Secondly, there is the need to justify assertions and validity claims. The connection between premises and conclusion should become clear through coherent argumentation and the orderly exchange of information. Speakers should back up their claims with generally comprehensible and reproducible reasoning rather than merely utter demands. The possibility for engaging in extensive explanations and justifications is also a question of the amount of time available.
Thirdly, participants in deliberation should feel some measure of solidarity with each other in that they recognize that they are united in the endeavor to improve the common good. Speakers should take into account not only their personal interests, but also those of the partners in deliberation and should be able to justify any claim made with reference to this common good.
The fourth criterion is that of respect. The deliberations should be based on the equality of the participants, and all should acknowledge that some of the partners in deliberation may be from social groups whose needs differ from one’s own and show respect towards counterarguments. Negative statements about groups and their claims
inhibit the uncoerced exchange of arguments.
The fifth element is that of an orientation towards consensus. A discourse should aim to reach a rationally motivated compromise that is acceptable to all its participants. The ideal of deliberative decision-making is based on the Habermasian discourse principle that all those affected could agree as participants in rational discourse.
Finally, all the statements and arguments should be made sincerely rather than motivated by strategic calculation or with the aim of deceiving other participants. Whereas Goodin applies the criterion of authenticity in his analysis, Steiner et al. actually exclude it from their deliberative quality index. This exclusion is based on the argument that authenticity “causes the greatest difficulties from a measurement perspective. To judge if a speech act is truthful is to make a judgement about a
person’s true versus their stated preferences. This is exceedingly difficult, since true
preferences are not directly observable.”38
If these criteria were applied to individual decision-making bodies of an international organizations such as the UN, it is reasonable to expect that none would come close to fully satisfying the broad requirements of the index, resulting in the assessment that no politically feasible reform could adequately improve their deliberative legitimacy. This unitary model of evaluating decision-making bodies isolated from their institutional framework has left many scholars of deliberative democracy unsatisfied and has led to what recently has been dubbed the ‘systemic turn in deliberative democracy’. The main characteristic of this development in scholarly thought is the
argument that one cannot sufficiently evaluate a political institution without taking into account its effects on other institutions within a system of governance.39 Rather, the systemic perspective makes it imperative to determine in how far the ‘deliberative deficits’ of one decision-making body might be mitigated by its relationship with another component of the system. Within a deliberative system, different deliberative tasks can be delivered by different institutions. Much importance must then be given to the appropriate sequencing of these deliberative moments.
Goodin gives the example of parliaments and parliamentary committees:40 Since parliaments are usually large representative bodies which aim to give as many voices as possible the chance to be heard and to place emphasis on the transparency of their debates and decision-making procedures, it would be practically impossible for them to collaboratively negotiate and elaborate the detailed phrasing of a particular law. This is why parliaments create committees: these smaller and more informal institutions enable a sort of cooperative creativity aimed at consensus which the large, public and formally inflexible plenum cannot provide.41 Since, however, these committees are usually composed of a small group of experts deliberating in camera, they lack transparency and inclusiveness. This deliberative deficit is, in turn, mitigated by the subsequent plenary debate in which the proposals worked out by the committees are publicized and their acceptance or rejection is advocated and rationalized in the light of the common good. In this way, the interplay between the two institutions, i.e., the sequencing of two deliberative moments, mitigates the distinct deliberative deficits of each.
39This usage of the term system is not to be confused with the Habermasian concept of system, i.e., the
instrumental counterpart to the lifeworld.
Goodin expands his model by placing the parliament and its committees into the wider framework of a representative democracy. This framework is based on four deliberative moments with differing tasks: the deliberations within the ‘caucus rooms’ of the political parties, the parliamentary debate, the election campaign, and ‘post-election arguing and bargaining.’ A short and simplified summary of his argument is that the caucus room fulfills the criterion of authenticity, the parliamentary debate fulfills the criterion of justification, the election campaign fulfills the criteria of open participation and consideration of the common good, whereas the post-election bargaining fulfills the criteria of respect and orientation towards consensus. As these deliberative moments are sequenced, they can be perceived as parts of a deliberative system and, as such, they come closer to the deliberative ideal than any one of these moments by itself.
Instead of evaluating each institution on its own terms, it is imperative to appreciate that these institutions are merely the components of a deliberative system in which they play a very specific and partial role in fulfilling the overall requirements of deliberative democracy. Considering the enormous task of satisfying the discourse quality index, the systemic outlook takes into account institutional specialization that creates a systemic ‘division of labor’. Despite all of this, the ideal remains of having all of the criteria of the deliberative quality index fulfilled by one deliberative moment. Goodin’s point is, however, that “while we cannot seriously expect all the deliberative virtues to be constantly on display at every step of the decision process in
a representative democracy, we can realistically expect that different deliberative
virtues might be on display at different steps of the process.”42 But what exactly is a
deliberative system? How can this division of deliberative tasks function?
Whereas Goodin provides examples of what the components of a deliberative system should do, John Dryzek attempts to demonstrate what these components should be. He creates a theoretical model of a deliberative system that aims at going beyond developed liberal democracies and is meant to be applicable to a wider variety of political systems, such as, e.g., transnational networks of governance. In his view, any deliberative system consists of five core elements:43
Firstly, there has to be a public space that is as unrestricted as possible, enabling the free flow of deliberation fuelled by a broad range of diverse viewpoints. It is the public space in which issues within society are identified and ideas for solutions are generated. Examples include the media, the internet, cafés, bars, citizen fora, etc.
Secondly, there is the need for an empowered space, an institution that produces collective decisions. Examples are legislatures, constitutional courts or corporatist councils.
The third element is that of transmission. The public space must be able to influence the deliberations and decision-making of the empowered space. This element is critical in holding the deliberative system together. Some of the various means of achieving this are political campaigns, rhetoric, or cultural change brought about by social movements.
43John Dryzek, „Democratization as Deliberative Capacity Building”,Comparative Political Studies,
The fourth element is accountability. The empowered space must, by some means, be accountable to the public space. This category can overlap with that of transmission, as political campaigning, e.g., can also be a means for ensuring accountability.
The final element of Dryzek’s model is decisiveness. All in all, the deliberative system must be able, through its decision-making, to determine social outcomes. Dryzek uses the political situation in Russia in the nineties when a ‘flourishing deliberative chamber’, i.e., the parliament, had only little influence on president Boris Yeltsin, who was ruling by decree, as a negative example of a deliberative system that lacks decisiveness.
In my view, one of the advantages of the differentiation between public space and empowered space is it’s comprehensiveness: It captures Fraser’s point about deliberation within the state apparatus and is comparable to her differentiation between weak and strong public spheres, but it also incorporates the fundamental difference between unregulated and virtually unlimited communicative spaces on the one hand and formalized and authoritative spaces on the other, which Brunkhorst has in mind when he conceptualizes what Fraser calls weak and strong public spheres solely as variants of the former.
It must be the primary goal of any proposal for institutional reform to enhance the deliberative synergy within such a system by strengthening the transmission and accountability between its deliberative moments. This does not only enable a complementary fulfillment of the deliberative task, but more importantly, it also increases the input from various public spheres into the respective decision-making procedures.
Deliberative Synergy via Transmission and Accountability
In order to assess a reform proposal’s prospects for increasing the deliberative synergy within an international organization such as the UN, it is necessary to clarify the particular contexts in which the deliberative moments are meant to be tied together. The legitimacy that one moment can transfer to the other depends both upon the nature of the actors involved and upon the specific mechanism of transmission. Actors at the UN generally derive their legitimacy for partaking in decision-making from their function as representatives, which means that the legitimacy of their input into the respective deliberations depends upon the nature of their representativeness and how it is maintained by means of accountability.
As a quality of social relations, accountability necessarily entails the question of agency: who is accountable to whom? According to Ruth Grant and Robert Keohane, the answer to this question depends on the model of accountability applied, i.e., either the delegation model or the participation model.44 The former identifies those individuals or institutions who have delegated authority to a social agent as those to whom this agent is accountable. The participation model, in contrast, designates those
who are affected by the performance of the social agent as those to whom this agent is accountable. Depending on which of these models is applied, some mechanisms of accountability are more appropriate than others.
Grant and Keohane distinguish between seven mechanisms for accountability that apply to the realm of international relations: hierarchical, supervisory, fiscal, legal, market, peer, and public reputational accountability.45 Hierarchical accountability applies to situations in which an agent is subordinate to an accountability holder who has extensive authority to sanction the former. Supervisory accountability exists between organizations that have principle-agent relationships. Fiscal accountability characterizes the relationship between the individual or organization providing funding and the funded agent. Legal accountability entails the obligation to follow formalized rules and procedures and the subjection to the enquiry and verdict of courts and quasi-judicial arenas. Market accountability is based on the ability of investors and consumers to sanction agents in response to performance. Peer accountability is the result of mutual evaluation among organizations on an equal footing and may affect their willingness to cooperate with their counterparts. Public reputational accountability applies to “situations in which reputation, widely and publicly known, provides a mechanism for accountability even in the absence of other
mechanisms as well as in conjunction with them.”46While all of these mechanisms are important to both models of accountability, the hierarchical, supervisory, fiscal and legal mechanisms are particularly important to the delegation model, whereas market, peer, and public reputational accountability play a greater role in the participation model.
Grant and Keohane do not include electoral accountability in their list because, in their view, it has no relevance in the realm of international relations. Yet, Mathias Koenig-Archibugi rightly objects that this exclusion of electoral accountability rests on the assumption that elections necessarily must be democratic. But, in fact, mechanisms of electoral accountability are common in the context of international organizations. They are, however, usually characterized by institutionalized inequality.47 Another point of critique raised by Koenig-Archibugi concerns the distinction between the delegation model and the participation model. He argues that claims for accountability which are based on the support given to an actor, such as donations to a relief agency, do not fit into this dualistic framework. The same often applies to legal mechanisms and horizontal mechanisms of accountability. Indeed, support mechanisms and horizontal mechanisms such as peer accountability and public reputational accountability do not seem to fit the participation model well. Social agents can be held to account by their supporters, their peers or the general public even if their performance does not have an impact on any of them. As Mark Bovens argues, courts cannot be conceptualized in a principal-agent framework and, therefore, legal accountability cannot be subsumed under the delegation model.48
Still, Grant and Keohane’s framework does not seem entirely implausible. The argument that there is a categorical difference between mechanisms such as hierarchical and supervisory accountability, on the one hand, and peer and public reputational accountability, e.g., on the other, intuitively seems appealing. The question is: what is it that distinguishes these mechanisms from each other? In my
47Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, “Accountability in Transnational Relations: How Distinctive is it?”, West European Politics, 33 (5), 2010, pp. 1142-1164.
view, the key factor is the definition of the actors involved. In social relationships characterized by mechanisms of hierarchical, supervisory or fiscal accountability, the question of which agent has to give account to whom is well defined. The delegation of authority is comparatively easy to trace. In typical hierarchical relationships, e.g., between business managers and their assistants, the performance of the latter will not necessarily be evaluated in accordance to some transparent standard that transcends their relationship. Managers might assess the performance of the assistants accountable to them as unsatisfactory according to their own expectations which might be opaque, arbitrary, or simply irrational to the latter. The principals of the World Bank can hold its board of directors to account for not abiding by their will, irrespective of the quality of its policies. In hierarchical, supervisory and fiscal mechanisms of accountability, authority is delegated and held by well-defined social actors.
‘discursive accountability’: social actors must act and communicate in terms that make sense within the respective discourses.49 Hence, the relevant categories are not delegation and participation, but delegation and discourse.
In order to better grasp the idea of discursive accountability, it is necessary to understand the correlated concept of representation. Dryzek uses the example of rock star Bono to illustrate discursive representation. The latter claims: “I represent a lot of people [in Africa] who have no voice at all…They haven’t asked me to represent them.”50 Obviously, Bono was not delegated any authority by those he claims to represent. In fact, most of his assumed constituents probably have never heard of him. Even though Bono himself would not necessarily agree with this analysis, what he represents is not a certain set of people, but rather a specific discourse on Africa that construes its inhabitants as victims of an unjust world and appeals to the consciousness of the wealthy without implying major structural transformation. This particular discourse is one of many that compete with each other regarding Western attitudes and policies concerning poverty in Africa. Altogether they form an issue-specific constellation of discourses in the public sphere.
Discourses have their roots in the public sphere, where, as Habermas calls it, ‘subjectless communication’ produces coherent sets of world views. Dryzek defines them “as a shared way of comprehending the world embedded in language. In this sense, a discourse is a set of concepts, categories, and ideas that will always feature
particular assumptions, judgments, contentions, dispositions, intentions, and
49John Dryzek,Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance, Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press 2010, p. 61.
capabilities.”51 Even though discourses necessarily bring a degree of organizing force with them, they are not to be understood in the Foucauldian sense as imprisoning. Instead, deliberation across discourses usually remains possible, albeit, at times, very challenging.
Individuals can represent a specific discourse in political deliberations and decision-making procedures if their attitudes and opinions are based on the respective concepts and categories. If deliberation across discourses leads participants to change their opinions, these modifications are either rationally justifiable on the foundations of the discourses they represent or they break with them, in which case the participants concerned no longer represent the discourse they started out with. Hence, the representatives are accountable to a discourse in that they are bound by its rationale.
Dryzek’s concept of discursive accountability, however, remains unclear with regard to the question of agency. If a discourse itself plays the role of the accountability holder, transgressions of its boundaries by its purported representatives have to be objectively verifiable, presupposing that the discourse is not only well-defined but also equally transparent to all of the participants. Even in the ideal scenario in which the occurrence of a transgression is undisputed to the degree of qualifying as ‘common sense’, accountability still rests on the implicit judgment of the people involved. Coming full circle, we are left with the question of agency: who is to judge the accountability holdee?
Dryzek attempts to get around this problem by bringing in the social scientist as deus
ex machina: observing the deliberations from the outside, scientists can measure the representatives’ adherence to discourses according to pre-established formulas.52 Even if we disregard the ontological and epistemological questions such a method of judgment raises (in how far does this method contradict the foundation of Dryzek’s approach in discourse ethics?), we are still left with the problem of its practical application. The political scenarios in which social scientists would be given such a crucial role in decision-making procedures are very limited. This, however, would defeat one of the main objectives of Dryzek’s approach, i.e., to create more flexible models of representation and accountability applicable to the modern world.
Ultimately, discursive accountability, as well, depends on principal-agent relationships. According to Dryzek “Accountability cannot in discursive representation be induced by the representative's fear of sanction […] Discursive accountability must be understood instead in communicative fashion.”53 Yet the
communicative fashion of accountability which he goes on to explain merely clarifies what the representatives areexpectedto do, not how they can be held toaccountfor it. Instead, the disciplinary force of a discourse is always to some degree supported by implicit threats of sanctions from other social actors. In legal accountability, agents are governed by the respective society’s institutions of law-giving and judging; in market accountability, they are subject to the judgments and reactions of the other market actors, etc.
Dryzek’s neglect of the question of agency in discursive accountability does not, however, diminish the concept’s significance. If relationships of accountability are
mediated through discourses, this alleviates the pressure to clearly define the social actors involved. The more defined the discourse represented, the less need there is to define the accountability holder. As transgressions of discursive boundaries in word and deed become easier to trace and, therefore, judgments on them become less controversial, the undefined mass of accountability holders will react more uniformly and can thereby temporarily define itself in its collective response. Hence, the force of discursive accountability depends upon the definition of the respective discourse, the transparency of the accountability holdee’s rationale for action and the accountability holdee’s dependency on the discourse’s supporters. The boundaries and imperatives set by discourses are only one part of effective discursive accountability.
Most people subscribe to various overlapping discourses, and their support of one or more of them signals that they want the decision-makers to take the concerns related to these discourses into consideration, rather than necessarily deciding between their contesting interests themselves in every given situation. Support is usually centered on discourses and the communicative action they entail, rather than on the actors themselves. It would be interesting to know, e.g., how many of those who have donated to Amnesty International or Greenpeace know the names of the heads of the organizations they support. Instead, these organizations represent specific discourses that appeal to those who support them.
Deliberative Moments and Synergies in the UN System
This section will analyze the UN in terms of a deliberative system and discuss the potential contributions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and the NGO community at the UN to the legitimacy of its decision-making on issues of global peace and security. It will begin be analyzing (1) the Security Council as the ultimate decision-making body of the UN, continue with (2) the General Assembly and its relationship to the SC and end with (3) the NGO community at the UN and its relationship to the SC.
(1) The Security Council is the focal point of the UN’s decision-making procedures on issues of global peace and security and functions as its empowered space par excellence. It is made up of five permanent members, i.e. China, France, Russia, the UK and the US, each of which have a veto right over all substantial decision-making, and ten members with two year mandates which are elected by the General Assembly. The UN Charter invests the Council with “the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.”54 Since in the Charter, moreover, “[t]he Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter,”55 the Council’s resolutions are binding by law, a characteristic that distinguishes it from any other decision-making body of the UN. Finally, the SC is the only body that may authorize the use of military force against a UN Member State.
54Charter of the United Nations, Chapter V, Article 24:
http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter5.shtml
55Charter of the United Nations, Chapter V, Article 25:
These remarkable competencies enable the SC to give clout to the UN’s decision-making on issues of global peace and security and to thereby fulfill Dryzek’s requirement of decisiveness. It is fairly easy to demonstrate that today, despite incessant criticisms and premature obituaries, the SC continues to exercise a decisive impact on global politics.56 Without this clout, the deliberations within the UN would remain fruitless and it is, therefore, essential that the Council fulfill its function of ensuring the decisiveness of this deliberative system. Hence, the more effective the SC’s decision-making becomes, the more decisive the deliberative system will be as a whole.
With regard to its deliberative qualities, it is an advantage that the structures of the Council give relatively strong incentives to seek consensus in its deliberations. The veto ensures that for any draft resolution to be successful, it necessarily has to take into account a number of perspectives from diverse political blocs. It has been demonstrated, moreover, that the function of the SC lies not only in determining the legality of a policy measure, but primarily in sending out a signal to the world concerning its political legitimacy.57Thus there is a high incentive for the sponsors of a draft resolution to obtain more than just the legally required number of votes. Every additional vote in favor increases the symbolic strength of the resolution and augments its compliance pull. In practice, the council members go to great lengths to achieve consensus, and today most decisions are adopted unanimously.58
56See, e.g., Mats Berdal, “The UN After Iraq“,Survival, 46 (3), 2004, pp. 83-102.
57Inis Claude, “Collective Legitimization as a Political Function of the United Nations”,International Organization, 20 (3), 1966, pp. 367-379; Erik Voeten, „The Political Origins of the UN Security Council’s Ability to Legitimize the Use of Force”,International Organization, 59 (3), 2005, pp. 527-557.
There are two particularly problematic issues with regard to the legitimacy of the Council: not only is it a highly exclusive forum for decision-making, but its internal structures are also distinctively unequal. It is widely accepted that the Council does not adequately represent the membership of the UN and lacks transparency to both membership and to the wider public, which severely limits participation in its deliberations.59 Furth
